Aswad
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ORIGINAL: LadyEllen
Rather, I would like to discuss the nature of God – [...] is as real as any other mental construct and indeed is the motivation behind real enough actions.
It's a matter of abstraction, I guess.
Objectively speaking, there is no such thing as LadyEllen or Aswad, but rather two large collections of cells (which are in turn large collections of molecules, etc.), which we abstractly represent as a single organism. Similarly, there is no such thing as the Internet, but rather a collection of machines, routers, wires and so forth, which are again composed of further subunits. Furthermore, the abstractions LadyEllen and Aswad remain unchanged by the death of the individual cells that make up these abstractions, just as the Internet remains the Internet whether or not the New York Times servers are turned off or not.
If we ascribe validity to these abstractions, we can certainly hold as valid further abstractions.
According to Stephen Wolfram's theories, as put forth in A New Kind of Science, the complexities that we deal with as such abstractions are little more than the interactions of simpler patterns that can be represented as cellular automata.
These complexities can then form layers of abstraction; for instance, the interactions that make up a neuron can be further abstracted in terms of the interactions between individual neurons, yielding the mind as a new layer of abstraction. Without delving into the field of memetics directly, one can assume that similar interactions occur between organisms. Indeed, a closed biosphere is nothing more than such an interaction.
Considering that the mind is an emergent property of the interactions of neurons, one can ascribe minds as an emergent property of the interactions that comprise a biosphere. This kind of a mind cannot be said to have any less validity as an abstraction than any other abstraction we consider a mind. And just as the mind of a human is incomprehensible at the level of an individual cell, and just as the mind of a human remains despite the death of an individual neuron, so too would a mind at this higher level of abstraction be incomprehensible at the level of an individual organism, and independent of the life and death of an individual organism.
This is, in essence, the Gaia hypothesis: that the Earth can be considered an organism that may possess sentience.
What levels of abstraction exist as intermediates, if any, is an open question, as we cannot comprehend these abstractions, nor model them without more computational power than we have at our disposal. Some would say not without more computational power than the sum of the system that we are simulating; indeed, this is one of the things forwarded by Wolfram: that the smallest system that can correctly model an entity is that entity itself.
Another open question is whether one can say that such an entity affects the cells involved. When the human mind "decided" to scare itself, the neurons of certain brain regions will fire in the pattern characteristic of fear. Similarly, if Gaia, assuming we admit the validity of that abstraction as a being, were to "think" (I put it in quotes because the mind of such an entity would not be comprehensible to us in any way) something, then we might assume that the organisms act in this way. One could model a war as a thought process in such an entity, and so forth.
At a further level of abstraction, it could be said that the universe itself constitutes such an entity.
Considering the universe as an entity, it would be the case that the complex interactions of physical forces can be considered identical to the processes that occur in our own organisms, and within certain models of physics, it could even be valid to consider that the universe may be a higher-dimensional entity in the sense of having a system of interactions that affects spatial dimensions that we cannot access.
Whether one chooses to view such a thing as a being we can interact with or not, and whether one chooses to view it as something mystic (in that it has no more "objective" existance than a human does as more than a collection of cells), is a different matter.
Albert Einstein, like Spinoza, had similar thoughts.
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So, the question isn’t really the tired and well-worn one of God’s existence, it is instead a question of the nature of God; real and objective, or a mental construct and subjective?
Taking it a step further, as I have, it is more a matter of perspective.
In the view of Einstein, G*d has an objective existence, and created the universe, but remains apart from it as an observer. He saw the beauty of the universe and the fact that it is in any way rational, structured and comprehensible to us as an indication that this was the case.
According to the observations above, one could also view G*d as being the universe, or as Gaia, or whatever.
I can work with either perspective, as well as the more metaphysical / supernatural one.
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We also need to widen this question a great deal from the Judaic-Christian-Islamic idea of God.
I'll go with that.
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Many cultures do not acknowledge this God, indeed our pre-Christian ancestors had many Gods and Goddesses and modern Hindus share this model. Clearly, the Hindus’ deities are just as real to them as the single God is to the Christian, which must undermine the objective credibility of at least one and possibly both, indicating that God (in the widest sense) must be purely a mental construct arising in us according to culture.
While most Christians hold that G*d is the only god, there is, strictly speaking, little in the way of support for this in the texts that make up the basis of the Christian faith. In fact, there are several passages that strongly suggest interactions between G*d and other deities.
For instance, the transitions between singular and plural during the Genesis chapter indicates that one being out of a whole decides to make Eden and all of that, in the "image" of (whatever that means; it is doubtful that it refers to a physical likeness, unless one goes with the idea that this world was very different in the past, which is a theory I doubt this crowd would like to pursue) that being's own "kind".
Further, the Genesis story acknowledges that the land of Canaan was settled when Adam and Eve left Eden. One might also point out that one posited location for Eden is that of Dilmun, where the Sumerian creation mythos claims that Marduk cleaved Tiamat in two to make the heaven and the earth.
Other tales include one that recounts how G*d interacts with an Egyptian site. I cannot recall the exact reference at the moment, and haven't got the Papyrus of Ani handy, so I cannot correlate the verses right now. But I seem to recall that the site in question was either an afterlife, a kind of paradise, or a physical gateway to such. As I recall, G*d destroyed it, which would seem to indicate some manner of interaction and acknowledgement of the existance of other dieties.
One does not preclude the other.
Of course, it should also be mentioned that there is a commonly held view that the "primitive" cultures of ages past anthromorphosized (sp?) their observations of the world around them, rather than observing actual entitites (whether spiritual, aliens, time travellers or whatever else your imagination could conceive as an alternate explanation to the atheist position).
The constructiveness of such debates is generally impaired by the campishness of most who engage in them, and the fact that many have had negative experiences with individuals or groups adhering to, or claiming to adhere to, specific faiths, including the atheist faith. I've covered the status of the latter as a faith in its own right elsewhere, so I won't reiterate. I have also commented on my observation of the oscillations that result from this problem, with one generation going to an extreme that drives the next to the opposite extreme and so forth, so I probably needn't elaborate on that either.
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But at the same time, many claim to have had direct personal experience of their God, and across cultures and religions, these experiences share many characteristics, despite there having been no possibility of collusion to make the recollections so similar and despite the cultural differences between those claiming the experiences.
There are many ways to view this. The field of memetics covers some of it. One could also say that the same influences were present in the bulk of these cultures, and that the same instincts are present in the bulk of humanity. Hence, if one holds to the theory that these faiths are built on anthropomorphized natural phenomena and such, then it is viable to claim that the same influences would result in such commonalities.
As for direct personal experiences, many have posited that these can be explained in terms of illnesses, such as epilepsy, schizophrenia, and so forth. Similarly, the bicameral mind theory posits that the human mind, at the time of the Sumerian mythos, was split into two halves, without actual self-awareness, and that later, a mutation or other development caused the bulk of the population to integrate these two minds, while some individuals retained the split, and that the latter became the shamans and prophets and so forth who guided the people and provided a neccessary bridge to the authority that was previously present in the bicameral mindset.
I have had some experiences, some of which could easily be attributed to mundane reasons with what we know today, others of which could be attributed to mundane reasons with future developments in our understanding of the brain as an organ.
As a rational and open-minded person, I have not decided on which of these is the case, but would not act on such experiences without having the opportunity to do so-called reality testing (not in the sense of lucid dreaming, as explained elsewhere) throughout an extended experience.
I will say that some of these have defied my attempts at explaining them in mundane terms, while most have not.
Those who have defied such attempts include a couple of events where external parties (who did not know of the experiences, thus being single-blinded) have confirmed key points whose absence would have completed a mundane and rational explanation, and whose presence makes such impossible, though the absence of disproof cannot be scientifically or rationally treated as proof.
However, it can serve as an indication that it is an area that bears further inspection.
As someone once said, the herald of great discoveries in science isn't "eureka!", but rather "hmm, that's odd". And while I cannot, and will not, claim that any of these experiences will lead anywhere (most cases of "that's odd" prove to be flukes), I will say that they are damn odd.
One should probably also add that I have been thoroughly examined in various ways, and do not have neurological disorders, hallucinations or other traits normally associated with such experiences, nor were the unexplainable experiences related to drug use or other typical means of inducing such experiences.
Again, I'm not assuming that there's anything to them, just opining that it hasn't been settled to my satisfaction either way.
I also mentioned on the thread "For those of a christian bent..." that my knowledge of neurological abnormalities, psychiatry and psychopharmacology leads me to question the validity of the Apocalypse of John, and its inclusion in the biblical canon, as many others have done, for the simple reason that, unlike other texts, this one bears the distinct character of someone undergoing a seizure with hallucinatory features.
So while I try to view things with an open mind, my rational nature keeps me skeptical and uninclined to take things at face value.
I would say, though, that it is my belief, though neither a conclusion, nor an assumption underlying my actions, that there is something more to this world that what our senses tell us, but I see no reason to go into the details of that here.
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Of course, this isn’t evidence necessarily of the objective nature of God but is also explicable by way of reference to the human mind and its functioning in the presence of the mental construct which regardless of culture can be named as God.
The distinction between the proper name of any individual deity, including "יהוה" (G*d in English), and the noun "god" (plural "gods") referring to deities in general, aside ...
Any god is, like any concept, a mental construct, per the map vs territory relation.
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As a function of our psychology, does God then fulfil a need we have for such a being? The question for believers and followers of whatever God is then, whether it matters particularly whether God is real or a mental construct, if that need for which God is required, is fulfilled?
For me, spirituality is a need.
I've got this world down, on several levels.
There's nothing in it on the physical plane worth my time, to be blunt.
Hence, in the absence of spirituality, there is nothing to this world for me. Which is not to say that I spend all my time pursuing it, or that I would go jump off a cliff if I were to have a moment of doubt (I have had several, and "moment" isn't the right unit of time for many of them), merely that, while I may close myself to a particular view of it, I will not close myself to the possibility of spirituality. Giving up on what one feels to be worthwhile makes little sense, and if I don't find anything, and die, I will not have lost anything from pursuing it, as there was nothing (for me) to lose.
As to G*d, that is more a matter of taste.
I do not require the validity of G*d, or any god, for any purpose.
However, it is in conjunction with him/her/it that I have had a large number of my spiritual experiences.
Organized religion is a different matter. My views of that are fairly negative in many ways. And my experiences have not been tied to a particular church or religion, but rather to the individual people, places and so forth. I have felt an otherworldlyness to certian locations, and a particular presence around certain clergy. This has rarely been correlated with any quantifiable aspect of the architecture of the locations or the personality of the clergy. One would note that one of the strongest sensations of such a presence I have is when I start a training session in the presence of my sensei; as he performs the ceremonies at the kamidama, the same presence descends as I have felt elsewhere.
Of course, I am more of a Gnostic than a mainstream Christian, so that makes sense.
As evidenced by my tagline, I have also read some of the ideas of Jiddu Krishnamurti.
Much of what he says resonates with me. He is a paradoxical figure in some ways. He was proclaimed the reincarnation of the Maitreya Buddha, making him something of a messianic figure, a legacy he renounced at age 34. Yet, despite people having tried to influence him and his vision since he was a young child, he has retained the same nature from childhood to death, his vision uncorrupted by the influences of the world around him. Therein lies part of the paradox.
And, of course, if one clicks the link (his name above), the picture is of a man that has some ineffable quality about him.
One might well assume that Jesus, in his day, would have appeared much the same to his contemporaries, although being of a middle-eastern appearance, rather than an Indian one. Such a figure could well have appeared quite inspirational to his followers. Of course, Jesus espoused a view that is, in some ways, different from what Krishnamurti did, but there is also a gap of more than eighteen centuries from the death of one to the birth of the other, and no backdrop of Judaism.
I considered aiming for the priesthood in the Catholic church- the choice of church being quite simply related to the fact that they have the balls to act on their faith (though admittedly often misguided and hypocritical) and to hold a mystic view- but the reason for this was mostly an opportunity to help people, and a desire to eventually make it into the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, where I would have access to texts restricted by the church, along with as much of an opportunity to sow the seeds of change as anywhere else.
Anyway ... this has been an excessively long-winded post on my part, but I hope someone found it interesting.
_____________________________
"If God saw what any of us did that night, he didn't seem to mind.
From then on I knew: God doesn't make the world this way.
We do." -- Rorschack, Watchmen.
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RE: the nature of God; does it matter? - 
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